AMD offers Opteron upgrade discounts

Drops Istanbul's price before launch

By Austin Modine in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Servers, 7th April 2009 19:37 GMT

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AMD said today it's offering discounts to businesses that upgrade their servers with newer Opteron processors.

The chip designer's new upgrade program includes a discount of up to 35 per cent for dual- and quad-core Opterons, as well as AMD's sex-core "Istanbul" processor currently on track for release in the second half of this year. (Does it count as a discount it arrives before the product is priced in the first place? Or is that technically just AMD planning to raise the price later? Hmm...)

Channel partners and customers can get 2000 series Opteron chips $50 cheaper and 8000 series reduced by $100, the company said.

AMD pitches that its discounted upgrades will ease IT budgets during the Meltdown, tempting sysadmins to opt for the discounts rather an switching to new boxes. The company also highlights its Direct Connect architecture's ability to handle multiple generations of Opteron chips. ®

Update

Yes, sex-core. Six doesn't get a break from being derived from the Latin number system. Two = dual-core, four = quad-core, so six = sex-core. Perfectly reasonable!

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